Flatoleth 2
Supervague thought..........

Last night's dream included a trick or device that happens often in dreams. I was driving from Enid to Stillwater on (real) highway 51. It was late at night in modern times, which means most businesses were vacant and abandoned. I was low on gas and needed to find a gas station, but all the gas stations were abandoned. Finally the KerMac SuperCenter appeared, brightly lit and clearly open. I stopped and filled up my Squareback.

The trick: Inside the dream I remembered filling up at this same KerMac SuperCenter in previous dreams. I knew it wasn't real-life, and I also knew for sure that this was a 'plagiarized' piece of standard dream material.

Was it? No way of knowing** unless I'd recorded the earlier dreams after waking. In this case I hadn't, so the repetition is totally unverifiable.

Closely resembles the deja-vu switch in waking life. Deja-vu turns on occasionally. While it's on, many events seem like repetitions of previous observations. Soon the switch turns off, and the distinction between fresh and repeated is clear again.

Also resembles an aspect of deliberate story-writing. When you invent a situation and place it into the 'frequent habit' slot, the previous iterations of the event fill in automatically in the writer's mind AND the reader's mind.

Clearly there's a special entry point for events that happen often. Given the amount of real input it takes to develop a REAL template for frequent events, you'd think it would be especially hard to FAKE a frequent event. But it's not. It's easier to retro-fill a habitual occurrence than a single unique occurrence.

Do propagandists understand this vulnerable entry point? Is this why the flat statement needing no explanation works so well?

= = = = =

** In this case there's circumstantial evidence against repetition or earlier invention. The KerMac SuperCenter had a KM logo on its sign. Thus it came from yesterday's reference to the DV gas station that I'd included in the Route 66 set. A two-letter station, transposed into Oklahoma, would be KM; transposing to modern times would inevitably become a KerMac SuperCenter. As always it's fun to watch the creative operations of the dream-scripter; but this particular set of creative transpositions was easily traceable to immediate thoughts.

Labels: Age of Stings, Leth

  ¶ 3:26 AM